announcing him as a perfumer, or as a pharmacist, his sobriquet may
indicate him as a Platonist.
Appropriating the inverted fable format, Attar’sLanguage of the Birds
excludes ibn Sina’s initiating tale fromKalila and Dimna, but recasts his
frame story through Suhrawardi’s Platonic–Solomonic elaboration of the
Simurgh. Attar’s frame narrative relates the quest of an assembly of birds.
Led by the Hoopoe, they travel across the seven oceans to Mount Qaf
seeking their king, the Simurgh. The Hoopoe inspires the woeful birds with
a story:
The matter with the Simurgh–O miracle!–
Began once to disclose itself in China.
A feather fell down from her in the midst of China,
Whereupon turmoil seized the whole country.
Everybody procured himself an image of that feather
And whosoever beheld the image started to act.
This feather is, thus, in the picture gallery of China.
“Seek knowledge, be it even from China!”
If the image of her feather had not disclosed itself,
This uproar would not be in the world.
All these works of creation are there because of her/its radiance.
All images stem from the image of her feather.
But since her description has neither beginning nor end,
It is not befitting to speak more about her.^53
The feather resembles that of Suhrawardi’s Hoopoe, who sets offin spring-
time, plucks his feathers, and transforms into the Simurgh over the course
of a millennium. While the feather appears as a material trace, it transforms
into the image of a feather. People are fated to merely reproduce images of
that image.^54 Although incited to action by the image (naqsh) of the trace,
no accumulation of images satisfies them. False imagesfill an entire picture
gallery, yet bring their viewers no closer to the Simurgh, who only exists
through the works of creation revealing her radiance. Nonetheless, reflect-
ing the quotedHadithto seek unbounded knowledge, even false images are(^53) Bürgel, 1988 :6.
(^54) Suggesting that the feather may not be there at all, Hamid Dabashi argues that the truth
attributed to it through its representations underscores a repression of vision central to Islam.
Using a positivist paradigm valorizing presence over absence, he identifies the missing signifier
of the feather, like that of God, as a lack that Islam must pathologically veil. Yet outside of this
logocentric paradigm, the physical existence of the feather becomes secondary to the fact of
belief that ultimately constitutes the Simurgh. Dabashi, 2003 : 964.
94 The Insufficient Image